Expectancy effects of pain and disgust in perceptual and moral decisions

Although expectancy effects have been described before (e.g. placebo effect), no one ever questioned their specificity. After all, it might be that when people anticipate pain, they form a representation of the approaching event, which could be shared with other aversive experiences, such as the case of disgust. In the present thesis, I examined the nature and specificity of expectancy of pain and disgust in the context of perceptual decisions (Experiments 1 & 2) and higher cognitive (moral) decisions (Experiments 3 & 4). I conducted four experiments to analyze behavioral, physiological and neural measures (using fMRI) from healthy human volunteers, which were all engaged in a new experimental set-up, specifically developed for testing the following experimental questions: (1) to which degree pain and disgust expectations recruit similar/dissociated representations of the upcoming event? (2) to which extent pain and disgust expectations affect high-level decisions, such as those involving morally-questionable behavior?